On understanding inconsistent disciplinary behaviour in schools

Abstract

Inconsistent disciplinary administration across schools can inequitably impact students’ education access opportunities by separating certain students from familiar learning environments, especially in misconduct cases that result in longer-term removal. We empirically estimate whether such inconsistencies are attributable to heterogeneity in student body demographic characteristics. The results indicate that a greater number of disciplines that remove students from school for an extended period of time are observed in schools with a higher proportion of black students, but no significant differential punishment effects are observed in schools with a higher Hispanic student population. Furthermore, results of decomposing the marginal effects into conditional and unconditional elasticities indicate that it is not the case that schools with predominantly white student bodies have the least severe punishments and schools with more minority students have the most severe punishments. Rather, schools with inconsistent disciplinary behaviour have a proportion of the inconsistency attributable to the race of the student body.

Keywords:

• discipline
• inconsistent
• racial disparities
• schools

JEL Classification:

• J15
• I20

Notes

¹ The SSOCS also includes information about firearm offenses. It is excluded from our analysis because the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act mandates federal standardized punishments for these offenses, significantly reducing schools’ discretion in disciplining these misconducts. These results are available upon request.

² We do not present elasticity estimates with respect to the Hispanic student body because the Tobit models’ marginal effect estimates indicate a weak relationship between disciplinary inconsistencies and changes in the Hispanic student population.